The guy who invented the cell phone says 3,000 APs per square mile not 300: Marty Cooper has said unpleasant things about Wi-Fi in the past in defiance of its actual, working, functional nature, but I have to listen to what he says about ubiquitous cloud-like coverage. However, his firm ArrayComm has its own proprietary technology for the same effect, so we'd better not discount that factor, too.
I spoke to a telecom analyst in SF yesterday who said, bluntly, he thought it would cost $250 million to unwire San Francisco because of the topography, density of existing Wi-Fi installations, cost of obtaining rights of way (even if the city provides a lot of it), and even basics like electricity to handle the thousands of AP.
as much as free wifi is cool, i wonder if this will attract all the wifi thieves to san francisco?
And regarding access to the SF pre-proposals:
excuse regarding avilability of the proposals is not valid for a many reasons. the city continues to work behind the scenes on this issue and is trying to push through a solution without adequate community input.:
"Chris Vein, who heads San Francisco's technology office, declined to give many details about the proposals, citing the need to go over the documents first to excise any company secrets. The proposals, he said, range from very detailed to mere overviews"
1. they got all the responses by Friday - so they could have been removing any secret information as proposals were received.
2. After Friday 5pm, they could have removed the secrets over the weekend.
3. they have not posted any of the proposals on the techconnect website for public review.
4. in the Pre-RFI/RFC public meeting the city clearly stated that they could not really protect secret information since proposals would need to be public - so companies knew going in that they probably should not put that information in their submittals.
5. this approach was reitereated in the written guidelines provided by the city.
6. the city has been asked for a date as to when the proposals will be posted online and has not responded.
7. the city has been asked to make sure that all proposals are in electronic form rather than paper only to allow posting on the internet - they have not responded.
http://www.sfgov.org/site/tech_connect_page.asp?id=33899
$5.5M per square mile? I don't think any muni deployment has reached that high. Most are between $75K to $150K per square mile.
Frank